Why it's taken me three years to write this post (and how fear of failure will trick you)
I’m going to tell you about what’s been stopping me starting a blog the last three years.
I’m going to tell you so you don’t waste any more time making excuses for why you haven’t started that ‘thing’ yet.
Three years ago, I decided to leave my job in teaching. I didn’t have a job lined up, or an idea of what I would do. I did know that I’d love to start my own ‘thing’ one day. Maybe a blog or podcast or heck, maybe one day even a business.
But I had lots to learn and didn’t know where to start. I landed a job at Avado, a digital-first learning provider. I wasn’t sure what to expect but my role involved delivering a course in Digital Marketing which was developed with Google. It seemed a sensible place to begin, and I was won over by the potential to get experience in a growing business.
It didn’t disappoint. I’ve had so many new experiences and gained so many new skills working there. I’m still there, and although my job fulfils me in SO many ways, I’ve always had a small bubbling desire to pursue some kind of ‘side project’ hobby and see where it goes.
So why hadn’t I done it yet?
Oh I had. In some shape or form I had. Over the past three years I’ve cycled through intense periods of inspiration and long periods of nothingness. Reading, writing, researching, planning. Ohhh so much planning. But then… I was busy. I was working on a masters dissertation, I was moving house, I’d got a promotion, sometimes, all of these were happening at the same time. And although these things are all true - I’m not superhuman and I can’t do it all (although it’s taken me years to begin to accept that), none of those reasons really explain why I wasn’t getting it done.
So I asked myself, ‘if I had all the time in the world, and I had it all ready to go, what would be stopping me?’
I didn’t quite appreciate the gravity of that answer until committing to write this blog, publish a website and share it across social. Finally, after years I was going to do it… and it made me want to run and hide away in a corner.
What would people think about it? What if it wasn’t any good? Am I mentally prepared to put myself out there? People that know me will see it! People I work with will see it! What if people think it’s lame? What if I can’t sustain it? What if, when it becomes ‘real’, it loses its private fun and I make it pressurised? What if I do a classic ‘Rachel’, go all in, work loads on it, then lose interest or burnout and give up?
Do all of those things actually matter? No. But our mind and emotions aren't as swayed by logic as we'd like to think, it’s so easy to be tricked into believing we’ve made a rational decision to not pursue something, when it’s really fear disguised as logic. The only reason I know those thoughts were floating about in my brain, is because I’ve practised paying attention to what’s in my head - a lot.
All of these questions reflected my fear of failure, and are symptomatic of being a ‘perfectionist’. It’s a term I hadn’t related to before because it’s shrouded with misconception. It's a classically tedious response to the interview question ‘what’s your biggest weakness?’ and wrongly associated with being about perfecting ‘tasks’. I’ll go into more detail about what it means to be a perfectionist in another post, but to put it briefly, perfectionism is a fear of failure. Whether it’s failing to meet the expectations you have of yourself, or those you think others have of you, or failing to be good ‘enough’, perfectionism is a fear of failure.
I don’t have the answers to all of the questions above, but I’m now prepared to face them as fear of failure working damn hard to stop me doing what I want, and what I can do. It would be so ‘easy’, in the short term, to abandon ship and avoid the feeling of discomfort this all brings. I don’t HAVE to do this, so why bother if it makes me feel so uneasy?
Because there is SO much of life we will miss out on, if we continue to let fear of failure take the reigns.
It isn’t simple. It’s not a case of ‘throw caution to the wind, get over it and face your fears’ as many Instagram quotes would lead you to believe. I didn’t just land here. It’s been a process over the last couple of years. A combination of reflection, coaching, chatting to others and a period of therapy that completely opened my eyes to it all. So now I'm going to share it with you. Blog underway, podcast to come.
So if you want to find out how to make friends with failure, conquer perfectionism and realise your potential - follow me on Linkedin and Instagram.
